The real question of the hour is how Nate Silver, who became the intellectual crush of thinking people everywhere by taking a hard-nosed statistical approach to the squishy world of political analysis, has now seemingly embarked on a career, as the poet said, of "peddling freakonomics-lite contrarianism."

You can point to Silver's hiring of Pielke as a mistake, but really, why is he making that mistake? There are a number of factors:

A) He does not have expertise in this area himself.
B) It is a lot more time consuming and difficult to become an expert in climate science and policy than, say, the dynamics of running for Congress.
C) He wanted a contrarian take, which he wrongly believes is what people are looking for from 538.

Unlike politics and sports analysis, where contrarianism is easy and fun because they are saturated with sloppy methodology and magical thinking, climate science is populated mostly by an elite group of highly trained specialists, and that makes successful contrarianism much, much harder.

One can imagine how this might be done. You could get someone very, very good at statistics (not Pielke, obviously) and go through important climate papers, and see what shakes out. One of the troubles with that, obviously, is that to all but a select few, that sort of thing is boring as hell.

Or you could do what I do, and what a lot of other much better informed and more witty people do, and be a contrarians to the contrarians. That's far easier. Their mistakes are glaring, their personality disorders, amusing and dramatic. Since many of the worst offenders are public officials and those that are not get a relentless stream of free publicity from the right-wing hate machine, in contrast to the scientists many people know who they are.

But perhaps Nate did not like all the competition in this space, or perhaps he is shy of embarking on a course which, yet again, would enrage reality-phobic conservatives. But for whatever reason, the new 538 is looking like a caricature of the old 538, leaving bewildered former admirers to ask, do you really not see the difference between the great stuff you were doing before, and the shlock you're putting your name to now?

Some try to sugar-coat their anti-growth arguments by focusing their
attention on the rich world. But with most of the world’s expected
growth to occur in the poor parts of the world, such arguments are
simply mathematical non sequiturs. The reality is that to be anti-growth
today is actually to be anti-growth with respect to poor countries. The
fact that very few, if any, anti-growth activists are openly demanding
that poor countries remain poor tells us how powerful a force growth is
in today’s global politics.

So in other words, people who see limits to growth typically focus on rich countries -- countries which are presumably running up against those limits. They do not focus on poor countries, whom everyone realizes need a significant amount of growth (growth which hopefully, in contradistinction to America's recent experience, will not send 95% of its benefits to the richest 1% of the population.)

So, is it mathematically impossible to be against growth in rich countries and for it in poor countries? Let's consider an analogous argument:

Anti-obesity campaigners disguise their anti-nutrition agenda by claiming to focus on people who are unhealthily overweight. Yet the hard fact remains that the majority of rapid weight gain occurs in babies. So the reality of being anti-weight gain today is to favor malnourished babies. The fact that very few, if any anti-obesity campaigners openly advocate starving young children tells us how politically weak (not to mention dishonest) they are.